


the insect filled jars in rows

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, John-centric, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, a little bit like character study but not really oops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 07:11:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/671692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The truth is that nobody ever gets over anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the insect filled jars in rows

**Author's Note:**

> My dearest thanks to Emily, for all the help with this and everything else in my life. 
> 
>  
> 
> _For Aggie, in memoriam._

John doesn’t write about it. 

He is physically unable to function on any level for nearly two weeks before Harry and their father show up at 221b Baker Street; Harry forces him to shower and shave and floss his teeth while arguably one of John’s least favourite people pokes around his home, and John can do nothing.

He can feel it, kicking around in him, somewhere: bile at the bottom of his throat, a tremor in his hand, tension in his neck.

Anger.

It’s barely there, but already, just a bit of it is resurfacing.

That has to be something good, he thinks, but he still can’t write about it.

-x-

“It will take time to adjust,” Ella tells him during his second session back in therapy. “Closure takes time.”

And meanwhile, Time just does its job, Time just goes about its work of making John look and feel like shit.

Closure is a horrible word, John thinks. To boot, it describes a nonexistent condition.

The truth is that nobody ever gets over anything.

-x-

John remembers, on the thirty-seventh day that Sherlock has been dead, an article from a medical journal he read years ago. 

It talked about a study done at by a Professor at an American school where they had a subject group wear glasses that flipped their vision, so that they saw everything upside down. By the middle of the third day, the subjects reported that their vision had returned to normal. This did not indicate error with their glasses, but instead their brains took, on average, 75 hours to readjust to the world around them.

And yet John wakes up some mornings and makes two cups of tea and makes extra toast and sobs will catch in his throat eventually.

Funny, that.

-x-

 

The thing is, John thought that he was good for Sherlock. He thought they were a good and proper pair. He knew Sherlock, really knew him, and he just--

He cannot forgive himself for not seeing the state Sherlock must have been in.

It takes a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to really care about someone. Courage to walk into other people’s lives, to wind them into your own. It seems as though everyone else lives in fortresses: behind stone walls, behind moats, fences with spikes.

But people turn out to be living just the way that John was taught: they are all jerry-built. Some, not even that: some people will leave the front door unlocked and you can just walk right in, so long as you get an initial invitation.

Sherlock, for all his individualities, had been no different.

-x-

“I should have been a better friend to you,” John says to Sherlock, one night in a dream.

“You were the best friend I ever had, John.”

“But I wasn’t good enough,” when Sherlock starts melting like sugar cubes in the rain. 

“You were,” Sherlock says.

“But I--”

“It was not,” Sherlock whispers, when he’s nearly a puddle, “for a lack of trying.”

-x-

A package shows up on the doorstep of 221b on a Tuesday morning, with a note from Mycroft.

Please have these. My mother wishes you to keep them.

John gets the box up the stairs and sits on the floor in front of the coffee table. He finds a photo of Sherlock as a child, no more than five years old, and laughs until he cries.

There are high school report cards and psychiatric evaluations inside files, but John does not care to look at them. 

But there is Sherlock’s thesis, and there is a sweetly inaccurate drawing of two cows in a field dated from the year that Sherlock turned five, and John looks at everything, piece by piece, until the box is empty and the sky is growing dark again.

-x-

John had seen Sherlock look a million different ways. The man was daft, absolutely bonkers, but John thinks that everyone is, in their own way, and no matter what Sherlock did, John just genuinely liked him so much that nothing else mattered.

John had dragged Sherlock to Tesco once, on a weekday evening, and they walked the aisles until their buggy was full, and on the way home Sherlock made John wait for him as he bought a bottle of red wine, and Sherlock had smiled so softly that John had wished to freeze time and keep the small fragment tucked away somewhere that sadness could never reach.

And he had seen Sherlock sit silently on the couch for two days with a blank expression on his face. And he had seen Sherlock drunk off wine, and drunk off scotch and John--John knew the difference. And he’d seen Sherlock laugh so hard that his eyes watered, and he’d seen Sherlock shake with rage, and he’d seen Sherlock’s face soft with sleep on the sofa.

-x-

There are people, John understands, that one can just love and love and the reservoir will never run dry.

-x-

 John goes through Sherlock’s ratty old index one Saturday, and he imagines all the different cases he could write up.

He doesn’t write anything.

-x- 

The bottom line is this: John was Sherlock’s best friend and he didn’t see it coming.

He didn’t see it, and he should have known, and he should have made it better.

Sherlock made the choice to jump off Bart’s, but it was still John’s fault.

Just as much his as Sherlock’s.

-x-

There are things about their life together that nobody will ever understand. People either think he and Sherlock were shagging, or they don’t, but there isn’t a normal, predictable label that would actually fit what they had together.

John had never had as much fun with anyone as he had with Sherlock.

And that’s all happiness ever should be, isn’t it? 

Just fun.

And he was happy, wasn’t he? With the life they had made together?

He doesn’t remember a time between meeting Sherlock and watching Sherlock die when he ever thought his life was lacking.

-x-

One night, what feels like years ago, now, John had been answering an email to Harry when Sherlock quietly slid onto the couch beside John and had taken a throw cushion and promptly placed his head onto John’s thigh. 

“Sherlock--”

“I can’t get it to stop,” he had said, curling his outrageously long legs into his stomach. “My whole god damn life, and it never, it doesn’t _go away_.”

And John had taken the moment, then, to think about, to try and figure it out on his own. “Your head,” he’d said, but it still sounded like a question.  “You are the only person, John, ever, who could make it go away for even a minute,” and the entire moments feels a bit larger, now, than John had understood, at the time.

-x-

John does look at Sherlock’s psychiatric evaluation, one evening. It’s thick, and this makes John sad before he has even opened the file folder. 

_Hyperactive_ , the first one reads. Age four.

 _Attention deficit_. Age six.

 _Possible Asperger’s_. Seven.

 _Bipolar_. Eleven.

 _Manic depressive_. Seventeen.

And in the side margin of one page torn from a notepad, missing a date: _Stupid_.

All John can think is no, this is all wrong, all of it.

 _Sensitive_ , John corrects, and then throws the file into the fireplace. Just sensitive.

-x-

He dreams one night that Sherlock slips into John’s bed in the middle of the night and kisses him.

And even in the dream, John is surprised. 

“Oh,” John breathes into Sherlock’s mouth before kissing him back.

_Oh._

-x-

There comes a day when John gets a large manila envelope in the post and opens it with handle of the spoon he’s just used to eat his breakfast cereal, and there’s a very large figure somewhere around the halfway mark of the page, and apparently it all belongs to him now. 

It’s not a conversation John remembers having with Sherlock, but he knows the detective could copy any signature he wanted, and John would not have been an exception.

-x-

John takes a train to Dover and sits on the beach and he imagines what it would be like if Sherlock were with him. He imagines kissing Sherlock on the beach. He imagines vacationing with him, in general. Eating too much food and drinking too much wine and walking in the sand beside him, shoes in hand.

He rewrites his entire life with Sherlock, imagines kissing in the aisles of Tesco on a weekday evening, imagines sour kisses in the morning, imagines watching movies on the couch with Sherlock’s head always in John’s lap and John’s fingers always in Sherlock’s hair, imagines things that never happened, but it makes him smile, nonetheless, and John chalks it all up to missing his best friend.

He goes back to London earlier than he’d planned.

-x-

He doesn’t write about any of that.

He doesn’t write anything.

-x-

Sherlock jumped off a building and died and John should have known how emotionally destroyed Sherlock had been, and one day John gets past blaming himself and realizes that he would have known.

He’s not stupid.

He would have known.

-x-

Sherlock was high-strung, certainly, but John’s discomforts with the world were more...natural.

John may not be as observant as Sherlock ever was, but he can feel it when someone is watching him.

-x-

He does realize, really, that he is meant to live out the rest of his life. On average, he has forty more years to go. With what Sherlock left him, he doesn’t much need to work anymore, but he thinks he should maybe consider finding something to do with his time.

He can miss Sherlock with every breath, but he cannot dedicate every breath to missing him, and those two things need to be different or else John really has nothing left to go on.

-x-

John wonders if Sherlock loved him the same way John loved him. 

And John did love him. Very much, he loved him. 

And John did know that Sherlock cared about John. He wouldn’t have kept John around if he hadn’t cared for him. But John isn’t stupid and he knows that you can love someone more than anything and not love the person all that much, if one were busy with other things.

-x-

He’s in a book store when he can feel it again. 

Someone.

He turns back to the shelf with the old editions of Vonnegut, and buys the oldest copy of Breakfast of Champions that he can find. Sherlock hated Vonnegut.

-x-

 

John’s dreams of Sherlock only sometimes include the tall man climbing the second set of stairs to John’s bed, and yet--

“Jesus Sherlock, your feet are freezing,” John manages to say before he’s being pressed into the mattress. 

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says, and then he’s laughing.

John kisses him back, always, and touches him everywhere he can. 

After, Sherlock says, “Please be careful.”   “Yeah, you too.”   “John, I mean it.”

John kisses Sherlock again and again until he cannot breathe and Sherlock says, “You are my best friend,” until he starts to slip away into nothing, and John says, “Fuck you,” and wakes up feeling hollow.

He does not know what that means.

-x-

There’s a tall man following John for seven blocks before a black Rolls Royce pulls up beside him at the corner, and a younger woman in black business attire climbs out from the back seat and tells him it’s urgent.

They drive John home and Mycroft makes no further communication. 

John goes into Sherlock’s room and finds his index and reads every page.

He can find nothing that jogs anything in his memory, nothing that feels unsettlingly like the man on the sidewalk.

He draws the blinds in 221b and sleeps with his gun under his pillow.

-x-

The fact that John is afraid does not change anything. 

Sherlock is dead and gone, and John had been an idiot and a bit of a horrible friend, and it will never feel better ever again.  
-x-

John also dreams of blood and pavement and he wakes up screaming. 

He'd rather dream of Sherlock's death if it meant he could touch Sherlock and breathe into his skin just once, but he does not have a choice. And so if he can help it, he touches Sherlock in his dreams and lives with his death, and it helps him get through most days.

-x-

One day, a Friday, John spots the same ginger student wearing a navy blue zip up on three separate occasions. Never close enough to get a good look at him, but he’s got texts books and John catches the title of one, about birds, and it makes him pause.

He does not know why.

-x-

That same night he’s walking back from Tesco and he’s three doors down from 221b and his groceries get knocked from his hands and he gets shoved into a doorway, and he blinks and blinks and--

“You can punch me and yell at me later, John, but there’s a guy across the street who is going to shoot us both if you don’t listen very carefully.”

-x-

They do get into 221b safely and they get John’s gun and they call Lestrade and it’s all well and good until John learns that Lestrade knew Sherlock was alive and that’s when John does punch him.

Avoids his nose and cheekbones, but punches him nonetheless.

Then Sherlock tells John everything, and they fall asleep on top of the covers of John’s bed.

-x-

They get a week to themselves before the news coverage blows up. It’s strange and awful and wonderful. 

And John doesn’t write much, doesn’t quite have the time, but he listens and listens and laughs and makes two cups of tea, and Sherlock tells him, “I missed you. I am sorry,” over and over and it doesn’t get old.

And John slides into Sherlock’s bed late at night and says, “I know. I know. Me too,” and kisses him.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and inspiration come from the Fionn Regan song "Cowshed."
> 
>  
> 
> _I still see the insect filled jars in rows_  
>  The calculations and the diagrams, constellations  
> High strung  
> The cat got your tongue  
> The spotlight came out  
> You'd been hung  
> I followed the trail  
> when I heard that they found  
> You in the cowshed  
> 


End file.
